SMJFL - Division 1 - Under 15's Sunday 4th April 2004 Venue: Away

Spurley Hey	5 - 3	Hazel Grove U 15's
		E.Clegg(2), C.Kemp

With the afternoon kick-off delayed due to the non-appearance of the referee combined with atrocious weather and a pitch that was probably un-playable before the end of the game great credit must go the both teams for putting on a very exciting and oddly enough high quality football match.

Grove will want to forget the first 10 minutes when a combination of poor defending and goal keeping allowed the home team to score two simple goals. Given the weather conditions it would have been easy for Grove to let their heads drop but they didn’t . They kept plugging away and despite the conditions played some lovely passing football into the wind. In this first half it all seemed to stop flowing outside the Spurley area and despite creating some good pressure we never made their keeper work. Defensively we held things together well for the rest of the half and Matt also had little to do by way of making saves.

Grove started the second half very strongly and could have been level after five minutes but Eric just lost control in the penalty area and these chances were spurned. For the first 20 minutes of the half it was all one way traffic with Grove in control putting the Spurley defence and keeper under pressure. We did get the ball in the net in this period but the referee judged the final touch to be offside, which in fairness it probably was. Right after this the boys were hit by a real sucker punch when a quality ball over our defence sent Spurley’s Paul Wooley into the area where he sent a terrific chip shot over Matt to make the score 3-0. Within 5 minutes Grove found themselves 4-0 down when former Grove player Rick Crawford got behind Jack and beat Matt with a well placed shot. Given the balance of play during the game and the second half in particular this score was unbelievable. Grove got back in the match when Eric collected a pass from the right and prodded the ball past the keeper from close range. Shortly after this in one of the best Grove moves of the game, Gary H dispossessed Rick 20 yards from the Grove goal and sent the ball forward to Gary W. Gaz took a touch before sending a perfect long range pass to Babba. Babba’s first time cross into the area landed at Eric’s feet 12 yards out and the deficit was now two. Grove were still celebrating when a Spurley player who seemed to be 4 yards offside fired the ball into the net and unbelievably the ref allowed the goal to stand. Carl scored our third goal with a couple of minutes to go but it was too late to make an impact on the result. The game and our title were gone, but a great deal of pride had been restored.

The title wasn’t lost this afternoon to our biggest rivals it was lost over the season in games where we let teams off the hook. Indifferent performances early in the season when we surrendered 3 nil and 2 nil half-time scores to draws against Vulcans and Signol respectively had a big impact. Getting beaten in the home return games against both these teams, particularly the lack of belief in these games, just about killed our season and losing Shaun, Callum and Danny after 6 league games was a contributing factor. Frankly, however, the squad that was left were good enough to retain the title and do well in the cup competitions without them. I’m not sure the boys really believed this fact until it was too late.

(Match reporter: Rob Hawthorne)